Thanks bond. I think this may be the info I was fishing for. What resolution and settings do you normally play at?

Edit: I was also tossing around the idea that BF3 may have a memory leak.

Edit: #2: I find there is no bottleneck in my system with regards to BF3 performance. I noted the GPU goes anywhere from ~70%-99% usage while playing, so I know the GPU is being fed well. Measured with MSI's afterburner. I would say my performance experience is quite similar to THG's results noted here.

Here is why my system does so well. Apparently this game is much more GPU limited than CPU limited.